“Evil is like a virus!” Frankland roared. “I’m doing quarantine! I show the people what evil can do! Evil’s not a mystery, damn it! I know it when I see it!” He rose to his feet, waved his hands. “It’s you who are judging me\ You got no right!”
Robitaille said nothing, just lay there beneath his dirty sheet. His mouth had fallen open.
“Hey, Robitaille!” Frankland said. He shook the priest by the shoulder. “Robitaille, you asleep?” He laughed. “You dead there, Father?”
Apparently the priest was not dead. His chest rose and fell with his shallow breaths. There was a little drool at the corner of his mouth. He had fallen asleep.
“Dang it!” Frankland pounded the wall with a fist. “You answer me!” he demanded. “Who are you to judge, you ol’ drunk!”
Robitaille lay inert. Frankland punched the wall again, then stalked out of the room, past the guard he’d put on Robitaille’s door, and who had told him that the priest was awake and asking for him. The guard watched Frankland with wide eyes as he stalked down the hall. “Robitaille okay?” he asked. Frankland didn’t answer. He walked out of the house, headed toward where his people were gathered on the grass beside the church. He heard Calhoun’s voice on the PA, making a few announcements about the day’s work details.
Hilkiah met him on the way. The big man looked grim. “Brother Frankland, I just heard something.” Frankland didn’t break stride, made Hilkiah walk after him. “Yeah?” he snarled. “If it’s trouble, I don’t want to hear it.”
“You know old Sam Hanson? The farmer, from out Baxter Road?”
“Yeah? He’s here, ain’t he?”
“Well, sure. And he’s with his friend Jack MacGregor.”
“So?”
Hilkiah hesitated. “Well, according to Brother Murphy, y’know, their guide, he heard the two of ’em makin’ out in their tent last night.”
Frankland stopped dead in his tracks and swiveled on Hilkiah. “You’re telling me what, Hilkiah?” Hilkiah seemed embarrassed. “Well. You know. They’s queer.”
Frankland looked at Hilkiah in astonishment. Sam Hanson was just an old soybean farmer, past fifty, and his friend Jack wasn’t much younger. Neither of them were the slightest bit—the slightest bit of whatever homosexuals were supposed to be, effeminate or lisping or whatever. Granted, the two had lived together for longer than Frankland had been in Rails Bluff, but there hadn’t been the slightest hint that there was anything deviant going on, everyone just assumed they lived together because they shared so many hobbies.
They tied flies, Frankland remembered, they’d won a prize at the county fair.
“Is Brother Murphy sure?” Frankland said.
“Oh yeah. He said they were kinda noisy. And it wasn’t just Murphy who heard it, neither.”
“Lordamighty,” Frankland said, stunned. “I can’t have this going on in my camp!” A new determination seized him.
I know evil when I see it. You don’t need to be a Catholic priest to know when Satan was among the people.
Frankland took off at a brisk stride toward where Dr. Calhoun was finishing off the morning service.
“Wait up there!” he shouted. He reached around his back, took out his Smith & Wesson, waved it over his head.
“We got one more item of business!” Frankland shouted. “Sam Hanson, Jack MacGregor, get up here!” Judge me, will he? Frankland thought. I’ll show him judgment!
They were going to have themselves some righteous atonement, by God. And they were going to have it now.
Later on, after Hanson and MacGregor had been exposed, after they had wept and crawled and begged God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of their neighbors, after they’d been separated and sent off to work with two different parties, Frankland heard from the guard he’d put over Robitaille that the priest had died in his sleep.
“Dang it!” Frankland wanted to hit something, but there was nothing nearby, so he kicked the ground instead.
Robitaille had slipped away, had escaped Frankland’s jurisdiction. Before Frankland could argue him around to his way of thinking, before he could get Robitaille to denounce the Catholic church and join his own.
Before he could save Robitaille’s soul.
“Dang it!” Frankland said again.
If only he’d had another few more days.
“I have some preliminary figures, sir,” said Boris Lipinsky.
“By all means,” said the President. Lipinsky turned up in the Oval Office, every morning at ten a.m., to bombard his president with numbers. The President had gotten used to it by now. He was staring out the Oval Office windows at the White House grounds. A light rain was falling, spattering the glass with tiny drops. He turned and sat himself behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk.
“Please sit down, Boris,” he said. “And if you can, try to keep it brief. I have to attend Congressman Delarue’s funeral.” Delarue, a party stalwart, had died of a heart attack during an aftershock while on a visit to his home district in Arkansas. Being what the government termed a “Vietnam-era veteran”—without, however, actually having served in Vietnam—Delarue would be buried in the military cemetery at Arlington, after a service in the capital.
Lipinsky spoke without referring to the notes in his hand. The President, who usually needed his briefing books to remind him of the reasons behind his positions on the issues, could only envy Lipinsky this ability.
“We believe the quakes in the New Madrid region have killed between fifteen and twenty thousand people. Almost two hundred thousand have injuries serious enough to require hospitalization. There are approximately three million homeless people in the New Madrid seismic zone, of whom over fifty percent are now living out of doors for lack of a safe structure to house in, and a further five million in need of one form of assistance or other, either food aid, ice, medical aid short of hospitalization, or emergency financial aid in order to purchase food or other basic necessities.” He blinked behind his thick spectacles. “These figures are very preliminary, sir.”
“Ice?” the President said. “Why are we providing people with ice?” He had pictures of cocktail parties at the government’s expense.
“To preserve food, Mr. President. The victim areas range from temperate to subtropical zones, and—”
“I understand now, thank you. Continue.”
Rain tapped on the Oval Office windows as Lipinsky licked his lips and continued. “Much of the area is still without electric power, particularly rural areas. The lack of electricity means that other utilities, such as water, gas, and sewage treatment, may be difficult if not impossible to restore. Lack of safe water and proper sanitation will almost inevitably result in epidemics of disease ranging from dysentery to cholera and typhoid.”
The President sat up in his chair. “Those diseases are in the United States?”
“I fear so, sir. Particularly on a major waterway such as the Mississippi.”
“You are taking—”
“We are taking every possible precaution, yes. Ranging from urging people to boil their water to preshipping the necessary medical supplies to centralized points within the victim areas.” He shook his head. “But there are entire districts—all rural—where we have been unable to do anything. We lack the assets to put into the victim areas, and even if we had the assets, the infrastructure no longer exists to put them in place.” Lipinsky solemnly shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands of people—maybe over a million—are entirely dependent on their own resources in this crisis. It is an ongoing tragedy to which we cannot even bear witness.”